Capstone

Eurekics  (heuristics)
 
“Convention can deliver sufficiency  but
beyond its walls, beyond “the  structures we
erect in such glorious and proud detail, lies
a spiritual plenitude that human structures
necessarily obscure.
 
In fact, it is because this fullness lies beyond
design that Krishna's revelation must come
through disruption.
 
If it came any other way it would have to come
through some sort of structure, and all structure
—no matter how “good”— exists by excluding
something.
 
If there is a love that lies beyond the law, only
a thief can be its prophet  (though from his point
of view he is not real thief at all; the real thieves
are those who lock  the doors, those who  guard
their hearts.”                     (Hyde, Trickster)

I lock my doors and guard my heart, hell yes:
homeland security. No country for thieves here. 
 
When Bob Yeager  convinced  us  to start an
HONORS English program,  in the name of the
whole-y ghost, I had to stifle the urge to suggest,
also, a  DISHONORS program for balance. .
 
I urge my classes to consider the Diabolical
(“to throw across”) as proper Siamese twin to
the Symbolical (“to throw together.”)  Does that
make me a bad person? Thief in the night?
 
They all know the
  “can’t have one without the other”
bromide tripping lightly across the lips but
rarely push it beyond the “moral matrix.”
and cry peace, peace, when there is no peace. 
 
                 Ancient History
 
William Penfound & Ted Noss & Cyrus Anderson
these three had fine reputations in biology & sociology
& education &  retired to Warren Wilson to join our
faculty in the 70’s when distinguished professors resigned
from big-boy places to continue a career here.  We didn’t
have all the earned doctorate doctors  back then as we do now.  
 
Two of these fellows eventually found themselves falling into
an idiosyncratic obsession with singular aspects of their
profession  that ultimately led to their neglecting common-
place nitty-gritty devilish details of their discipline. Totalitarian
in their old age. Single-minded.
 
Noss fell in love with narrating his own career and Penfound
got obsessive over some aspect of environmentalism.
Dean Kahl can clarify.
 
Dr. Anderson would listen to the world series in head phones
while we were planning monumental  changes in the Core and
Calendar.
 
My brother-in-law is an Episcopalian Priest with degrees
from Princeton, Yale and Harvard  who took on the business
world as a career personnel executive for Container Corporation.
 
“I walked through the back wall of the ‘church,’ he said,
describing his progress.  A beyond goodies & weasels
break-through, perhaps—if not beyond good and evil.
 
I walked though the back wall of “school” a little later —
several times in fact going back in at the front door and sure
enough: out the rear end.  Of but not In.  In but not of.
 
A former student and current staff member sent me an article
yesterday on Gregory Bateson:  

           "Old Men Ought to Be Explorers” 
 
That assumes some stalwart-ness. Some sense of the
location of  frontiers yet unknown.
 
There’s more than a good chance I’m spiraling  into the
idiosyncratic compulsion and personal anecdotal obsession
of a Ted Noss and William Penfound--convinced there's
virtue in it. Single minded. Idiot.
 
No country for old men. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and
sing, and  louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress...,

 (from Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium)